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Monday, October 7, 2013

The Art Walk downtown and stuff about dogs

The city's cooling down lately, but traffic is increasing and at the supermarket I found myself squeezing my shopping cart through crowded aisles just full of people. The snowbirds have returned it seems. Snowbirds, (in case you didn't know), are people who summer in the northern states and return to Arizona for the winter. It used to be just retirees, but I've heard of whole families with school age children doing this. I'm not sure how that works for them as my kids are just now coming to the end of their first quarter at school and will be getting their grades very soon. In fact Chloe's school has started it's fall break and she's home all week.

On Friday night the evening was cool and comfortable, so after sending my 2 older daughters off camping for the weekend we brought Naomi and her friend to the Art Walk down on Roosevelt St...

On our walk there we passed this very interesting mural...

"Day of the Dead" is coming and festive dolls were on display...

The girls took turns posing with this billboard/ poster/art thingy...

Naomi was too short!

This artist was doing some great work and it was nice to watch him paint.

It was a good outing and nice to be walking around outside on a beautiful night.

I brought Oscar to the dog park on Sunday, which was just full of dogs, including 2 very fat Huskies and a St. Bernard. I was a bit in shock to see those breeds around here. My friends who had Huskies when we lived in the mountains in New York said their dogs wanted to be outside all the time even in sub-zero temperatures. Huskies here in Phoenix spend half the year inside in the a/c trying not to move too much as I'm sure their owners don't crank the a/c to 60ºF. It's no wonder they were heavy.

The St.Bernard wasn't fat but he reminded me of the ones paraded around the streets of Bariloche, when we lived in Patagonia. They were bred to be mountain rescue dogs in the Alps, but the ones in this city in the Andes were all just for show. People would breed them and bring them to town to charge tourists money to get their photo taken with the dogs.

I refused to do it. The dogs often looked scraggly and a little underfed, and I didn't like how they treated them. In the evening they would load one (sometimes two) of these giant dogs into the trunk of a taxi cab and drive off. That's a lot of dog for the trunk of a sedan.

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"People are willing to take these extraordinary chances to become writers, musicians, or painters, and because of them, we have a culture. If this ever stops, our culture will die, because most of our culture, in fact, has been created by people that got paid nothing for it--people like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh or Mozart."-Kurt Vonnegut

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About Me

Carolyn Watson Dubisch is a writer and artist for children's books, comics, and more. She's also a radio show host for "Art of the Red River". She lives in Phoenix, the city in the desert, with her husband, world famous fantasy artist, Mike Dubisch, and three redheaded daughters. She blogs about her life, her art, and her ongoing search for the shady side of the street.